Flawed though it may be, Portland's arts tax is great at starting discussions, the most recent involving a potential general fund subsidy for arts tax collection. Speaking to an arts tax work committee on Tuesday, Commissioner Nick Fish suggested that the city might want to stop charging a "convenience fee" to people who pay the arts tax and various other bills using credit and debit cards. The lost money, Willamette Week reported, would be covered by the general fund instead.

While Fish now speaks about convenience fees broadly as a matter of city policy, the issue has an interesting history related specifically to the arts tax. It arose during a July work session devoted to the tax, and at that time the convenience fee problem had a lot to with a promise made to voters about the tax's administrative expenses. Aside from spending on implementation, the tax's explanatory statement read, "administrative costs of this fund are limited to 5 percent or less of gross revenues over a five year period."

The City Council violated that election promise almost immediately by amending the tax in a way that exempted many people, including many collecting public sector pensions. If the council decided not amend the tax further, the Revenue Bureau said in July, city code would have to be changed to allow administrative costs to reach 6.5 percent of gross revenue -- a 30 percent deviation from what voters were promised.

Enter the convenience fee, which taxpayers hate. The city decided well before last year's election to charge the fee, which it deemed necessary to offset merchant fees the city has to pay for credit- and debit-card transactions. The city could have decided up front to absorb the merchant fees, which are simply a cost of doing business, but doing so would have pushed expenses beyond the 5 percent cap. The consequences of scrapping the convenience fee became even more dire in July, by which point the 5 percent cap had become a fiction. So the city and commissioners cooked up a couple of ways to end the convenience fee and hide the consequences, if they so chose.

First, city staff at the July meeting discussed a legal opinion written by the city attorney's office that says, in effect, it's just fine not to characterize merchant fees as administrative costs. This violates common sense, but it may thread a legal needle in a Clintonian way. The other option discussed at the time: Pay for the merchant fee with other money, aka general fund money. Sound familiar?

The potential general fund subsidies for arts tax administration didn't stop there, however. The Office of Equity argued for additional tax-compliance outreach to poor communities and people who don't speak English. During the July session, Amanda Fritz strongly supported additional spending for that purpose, which would likely have been paid for with general fund dollars.

To which Fish responded: "If we decided through some equity piece that we wanted to do a different kind of robust outreach, and it was an additional cost, the council could fund that separately if they chose, if they thought it had value without violating the letter or the spirit of the 5 percent cap ... right?" The estimated cost of the additional outreach was about $100,000 per year.

Only a single commissioner raised an objection to this scheming: Dan Saltzman, who emphasized the importance of keeping faith with voters. Which raises a question. Mayor Charlie Hales and others argue that the heavily modified arts tax represents the will of voters, and therefore need not go back on the ballot. However, based upon the July work session, it's not clear that any of these people, with the exception of Saltzman, cares in the least what voters intended.

Which brings us to Fish's convenience-fee idea. It makes a lot of sense for the city to ditch such fees, and in the case of the arts tax simply absorb merchant fees. But forget about the general fund subsidy. Properly understood, these are administrative costs, and they should be paid with the revenue generated by the tax itself. If arts groups get less money as a result, they'll have to live with that. There will be administrative cap implications, but acknowledging these honestly is far better than trying to paper them over with general fund dollars.